One of the things I try to always remind my students of when they are working on their research project is that you don’t always get the results you want and that’s okay. You often learn better from a failure than a success and I was reminded of that this week.

In my journey to learn about how silver nanoparticles remove bromide from water, I have also learned a lot about what it is like to be an engineer. This week we tried to run the column with the Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) that we are testing to see which GAC that was impregnated with silver nanoparticles worked the best. After loading all of my mini column with the GAC to our desired 8 in. mark, I tried running water through, but I could not get water to run through any columns. This is where the engineering came in and we had to figure out why.

We loaded our control GAC that didn’t have nanoparticles in the column one pipet (1 mL) full at a time and run the water. We repeated this until we could not get sufficient flow of water. We determined that it took 3 pipets full of GAC to a height of 2 inches to get 5 mL of flow at a low pressure. I loaded the other 5 columns with the silver impregnanted GAC the exact same way as our control and tried to get water to flow. We tested 2 commercial GAC, 2 GACs that were made by Clemsen University, and Zeolte (no silver nanoparticles were on the Zeolite). The two new GACs from Clemsen would not work during my runs and the rest of the columns did.

I decided to pipet the GACs into a 15mL conical tube to see if the amount laded was the same for each. I noticd that the GAC from Clemsen was lower than the rest of the GACs. Based off of this, my goal for the beginning of nest week will be to try and figure out why the Clemsen GAC is acting differently from the rest and figure out what it’s flow capacity is.

My lesson is coming along with great ideas about what materials the students could add to their column to try to remove glucose from water.

Have a good week everyone!

-Taylor